Found Gestures

Found Gestures is a collaborative project by Chicago-based artist Susan Giles and Manchester-based artist Sally Morfill. Consisting of two artist residencies and exhibitions in two locations, Chicago and London, the project reflects the artists’ shared interest in the visual language of co-speech hand gestures. Each iteration begins with an engagement with an art space and its surrounding community in which participants are asked to describe past and present exhibitions. Participants’ speech and gestures are recorded using audio and motion-capture technology, then made into physical, material traces of the conversations that took place. These gestes trouvés (found gestures) are presented in exhibitions in the spaces in which they were recorded. The power to shift perception is associated with the art historical objet trouvé, objects designed with a primary non-art function placed in an art environment. Here, a series of gestes trouvés (found gestures), as evidence of shifting perceptions, are appropriated and removed from their usual context, to provide the content for this work.

This project is partially supported by an Individual Artist Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, a state agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Detail of:A Large Reference Corral, Literally Like a Counter, That Went around the Center and in the Center There Were Librarians: Reference Corral (Carolyn)
Honeycomb cardboard
18 x 23 x 16 feet
2018
Chicago Cultural Center

Photo Credit: Kip Wilkinson

Archive materials corresponding to exhibitions described by participants of Found Gestures.